15 June 2010

First it was Blubberin' Becky claiming that the President has "a deep seated hatred for white people." Now Rep. Steve King (R-IA) has decided to throw his pointy white hood into the ring:

"I'm offended by Eric Holder and the president also, their posture," said King, 61. "It looks like Eric Holder said that white people in America are cowards when it comes to race."

King continued: "The president has demonstrated that he has a default mechanism in him that breaks down the side of race on the side that favors the black person in the case of professor Gates and officer Crowley."

And exactly what is your problem with their "posture," Stevie? A little too uppity for your taste, perhaps?

Now Beck is nothing more than a demagogic shit-stirrer, concerned with little else than keeping his slack-jawed viewers frothing for his ratings and advertising dollars (and selling his dreadful novel, of course). As such, he's pretty much held to no standards, whatsoever, be they for objectivity, truth, or even rationality.

King, however, is an elected official trying to make political hay by claiming the attorney general is somehow hostile to whites and the President is a blatant racist. To that end, he simply lies. And since King has such a track record of asinine statements, the most shocking thing about all of this was seeing the writer actually call him out on his horseshit:

Holder, in a 2009 speech, did not suggest that whites are more cowardly than blacks when discussing race, as King indicated in the radio interview.

"Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot," Holder said, "in things racial we have always been and I believe continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards."

While I might've placed those 'grafs higher in the piece to serve as a more immediate exposure of King's mendacity, that it's there at all is wonder unto itself. Rather than uncritically repeating every claim as if it's a legitimate point of view that must be weighed by the reader--as is standard practice in the pursuit of "balance"--the writer actually fact checked.

Congratulations AP; now Journalism trails Stenography by only ten touchdowns, or so.